1958

I really love my work.

Nearly three months ago I was chased and beaten up by four men dressed in hoods who wanted to kill me. At first I thought it was a sick bastard’s joke, but I quickly found out that they were still medieval in this area. My crime was being found in a car with Mary Lee, she being white and me being not. What they did to her I do not know, for I never saw her again. But they kicked me around, beat me with tyre irons and whips, took it in turns to rape me whilst they whooped and then tried to castrate me with pliers and a saw but lost their nerve, so they just kicked me around until I passed out. The hoods didn’t cut it. I could hear their voices and smell their beery breath. I made one of them as Jimmy Reed, so the others must be Pete and Ricky James. They hung together like shit sticks to a blanket.

About three months before that they said that Ricky and Pete found a black girl making out with a white guy at the Rachelle place. They say that they beat her and then tied her to the bumper of their car and dragged her around the hard dirt tracks round here until she just fell to pieces. They even bragged about re-tying her to the rope when the leg by which she was tied to the car had come off. Even the worst pieces of redneck shit in the bars thought that they were sick fucks for doing this, but the cops were never troubled by anything about this. They just walked through it all. They were smart enough just to give the white guy a beating he’d never forget. If they had killed a white kid then they might have had bigger problems.

They left me there to die. Some time must have passed. I could barely walk and was bleeding from everywhere. I was humiliated and broken – no idea what to do. I couldn’t tell anyone, and certainly not the cops who would take no pity on me at all. I waited for a week or so until the worst of the pain was over, visited Old Ray and traded all that I had for bandages, a knife, lengths of cord, an apple, gasoline, a high caliber rifle, a pump action shotgun and more ammunition than I have ever seen or could ever use. These are the tools of my life’s work.

After practising some hard and good for a few days I staked out Ricky’s house; it was next to the old southern woods and gave me better cover than I had expected. I could pitch down in the long grass and see everything they were doing without letting them see me. I waited in those woods for more than eight hours until he came home from the sawmill, and sat down to eat with his wife in their front room. Some kind of pie. Beer for them, both from open bottles. Smiles. Exchanged common words in familial intimacy. Half open windows. Flies in the air, distant calls from children, somewhere. Gentle birdsong. Yellow, hazy warmth.

The first shot was the best; it took the top of his wife’s head clean off like the top of a melon on a range and blew her brains out over the back wall of the room. The beer bottle spun out of her hand and flew across the room, showering everything in white suds – her legs upended, one of them landing on the table and kicking like a cat struggling to get away. Ricky jumped, screamed like a girl and pissed himself. So did his son. The next blew out the window frame and showered both of them in thousands of silvery slivers of sharp glass. Ka-chunk went the action on the rifle, the spent cartridge flying out the housing like frightened bird. I missed with the next, but the fourth took out his son’s throat and threw him across the room like a toy. Then I flung up the gasoline and rag filled bottle which litted up the dousing I had given the house a few moments before. I could hear him screaming. Not in shock, but in sheer confusion.

The wooden house went up like dry old kindling. He runs out and screams like a madman. He can’t escape but he shouts out to neighbours hundreds of yards away. They make the call. Out in the sticks there is no regular fire service, but they have volunteers, like his brother Pete. Usually they complain because it makes them late for dinner, or their beer, or their girlfriends or whatever. I just buckle down and wait.

I give them time to get the call out by running over to Pete’s where I hide out in the bushes by the rear fence. Pete runs out like it’s his own place that is on fire, jumps into his cracker red and rust-busted pick-up and brodies off towards the blaze of red in the near distance, a little over half a mile away as the crow flies but about double that on the tracks. Good for me that I am flying like the crow. The smoke gathers. I can hear screaming and shouting, mixed in with the chattering of the rails.

Boldly I walk straight in through Pete’s rear door and crank the pump action. Kicking in the lounge screen I frighten the piss out of his two daughters and wife sitting there. One makes a move, but a swing from the butt of the gun puts her back down. Mother leaps to her feet as I blow the other’s chest out. More screams. She doesn’t seem to realise that I’m pointing it over the bridge of her nose. Her face comes off like the top of a tin can of tomatoes. The other daughter with the busted nose is now shrinking into the chair. She is thirteen or so. I knock her back down again and then quickly fuck her hard and pitilessly as she lies there wailing and crying. When I’m done I fire the shotgun into her chest and leave her to bleed to the end. I torch the house with the remaining gas then jog off for Mrs Reed’s house, behind the lane running into the town. The fuck did me good. I feel rejuvenated again. I feel motivated.

I pass by crackers on the road. They shrink away from me, with my guns and my blood and my motivations.

Mrs Reed is eighty, maybe more. Probably a lot more. Jimmy dotes. I make the shape of her bent stature in the kitchen diner and walk round to the window. I don’t think about what I am about to do. Reaching through the open window I grab her by the neck and haul her slight body out and onto the long grass in one lazy but solid movement. I don’t think. She cannot even scream. One finger deep into her carotid artery puts her into sleep. I knot and then throw the cord over the roof. I strip her thin body, tie her neck with the cord and haul her up until she leaves the ground at about six feet. I tie the cord onto the branch of her cherry tree. She wakes up a bit and kicks, but no sound comes out other than a futile sort of gurgling. I pick up a shovel from the back of the house and hit her with it, hard – edge on sometimes. I can hear her brittle bones splinter under the burst layers of her skin. I stop hitting her when one of her arms comes off.

I love my work.

I sit down beside the walnut trees in the garden and bite into my apple. I wait for them to come for me. And I’ll be damned ready when they do.